“Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now [with climate change]. Yet we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait the more difficult and expensive it becomes.” — Former NASA Scientist James Hansen

The Case for Asteroid Status

Worldwide, each of the last three decades has been warmer than the one before it, with 2012 the warmest year in history in the United States by a full 1 degree (a much larger than average year-to-year increase; globally 2012 was the 9th or 10th hottest on record, 2005 and 2010 were the two hottest years). The current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – directly correlated with global temperature fluctuations – are 38% higher now than the natural variations that occurred at any time in the last 400,000 years. Although there are differences in opinion about the rate of warming, if the vast majority of scientists are correct, adaptions required to our lifestyle to reverse the temperature and CO2 level rise grow increasingly more extreme and expensive each year we fail to address this threat.

Facts

28 straight years of warmer average temperatures: Global temperatures have not dipped below long-term averages since 1985 here.

Looking just at the U.S. climate, January-October 2012 were the warmest first 10 months of any year in U.S. history, with temperatures 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average of 55 degrees – here.

Even before Hurricane Sandy, billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. have tripled since the 1980s, here.

Carbon Dioxide levels; correlation of CO2 levels with global temperatures and global temperature variation over hundreds of thousands of years. Source: James Balog at TED.com

The Telescope

FRONTLINE explores the massive shift in public opinion on climate change, and the campaign behind it. Click here to watch the video.(Be sure to watch at 17:30 to see the monkeying with data scientists call “going down the up elevator.”

Proposed Solutions

Contrary to the first sentence in the “Case for Asteroid Status,” 2012 was not the warmest year in history worldwide. It is widely agreed that 1998 had the highest global temperature on record. See climate4you.com for global temperature data from many credible sources.

If you look at any graph of global temperature change over the past few decades, you can’t escape the impression that global temperature has been flat for the past 10-15 years or so. Even James Hansen – the scientist quoted above – has acknowledged that “the 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

The lack of warming in recent years has been covered in the New York Times and The Economist (look it up), and it has persuaded many prominent scientists to seriously reduce their estimates of how much warming we can expect in the next several decades. (see http://www.uwe-merckens.com/bilder/Wetter/ngeo.pdf)

So, while it’s widely recognized that CO2 emissions will make the world warmer, the science is not at all settled on the magnitude of their effect on the climate, or on human life. Or in the terms of this club, it’s an asteroid, but we have little sense of how big it is, and how fast it’s moving toward us.

The Asteroids Club

Thanks for the info. I looked into this and you’re right – it looks like the difference is whether we’re looking at US temperatures (2012 was warmest on record in US and by over 1 degree) or whether we’re looking at global temperatures (it was the 9th or 10th warmest globally). We’ll work on reworking that wording a bit as that is important info. The trend is probably the most important part and isn’t as vulnerable to “political meteorology” we’re all a bit given to. Lots of rain? It’s climate change. Really cold winter day? Climate change is a sham…

Thanks for the response and the revision in the text. The claim in the new version that “2005 and 2010 were the two hottest years” worldwide is certainly consistent with the ABC News story, which cites NASA as it’s source. From what I can gather, NASA’s record (which was collected under Hansen’s supervision) shows higher temperatures in the 21st Century then other records. Again, if you’re interested, you can refer to the Global Temperature page on climate4you.com to see that most records show that the highest global temperature was recorded in1998.

It’s frustratingly difficult to get a clear enough picture of global temperature to say with much confidence what year was the warmest, especially because we’re talking about temperature differences of tenths of a degree Celsius.

But in any case, I’ll leave it at that.

P.S. Sorry a couple of those links above didn’t work.

Wobblie42

I suppose, if you read Haidt, you are cognizant that humans seek to persuade more than they attempt to seek truth.

What is to be done. Stephen Schneider seems to be absolutely certain that the present threat of Global Warming is disastrous. Others, who I find quite credible, do not agree. Stephen says skeptics are ‘cherry-picking’ their data when they choose to emphasize the last decade of Global Temperatures. I say Stephen is committing the same error when not looking at temperatures for the last thousand years (including the Medieval Warm Period), last fifteen thousand years, last million years, and such, to make sure such an error, as ‘cherry-picking’, is not being committed by either camp.

Riding in on my hobbyhorse, I again insist that the best answer is to use Wikia technology to debate this issue between intelligent, knowledgeable, credible advocates for both sides. There is already http://www.climatewiki.org/wiki/Main_Page but as this site is moderated and edited by the Heartland Institute I would expect Stephen would not find this site acceptable. Surely an acceptable Wikia site, dedicated to discussing Global Warming, could be created between skeptics and advocates. This could result in as fair, eternally open, amendable, and as infinitely nuanced a debate as could ever be hoped for, or imagined.

And, most important of all, I, and my fellow skeptics could be wrong. If the time window for changing our behavior is as short as Stephen thinks it is, then we should hold this debate sooner rather than later. I think such a debate would allow both sides to present evidence that usually is not seen nor evaluated by the public. The very worse mistake that the advocates make is in insisting that there is no credible argument in opposition to their fear for the future. No argument can be made on the basis that no argument is even possible in principle anymore. Certainly no argument can be made stating that all opposition is fundamentally either stupid, dishonest, or without any merit at all.

Don’t demonize me, and I will refrain from demonizing you. Golden Rule kind of stuff.